E V Neale is one of my heroes and apparently unknown to Wikipedia! He was a barrister (and a Christian Socialist) at the time of the founding of the first retail co-operative at Toad Lane in Rochdale in the mid 1840s. At that time he drew up the first Industrial and Provident Legislation, which meant that co-operative organisations were recognised in law.
During the 1870s and at the age of 65, Neale took on the role of first secretary of the Co-operative Union for a total of 18 years. This was a federation of co-operatives and attempted to weld together retail and worker co-ops into a single movement. Neale traveled extensively in Europe and reported each year on his observations of the potential of worker co-operatives and his vision for an alternative economy based upon co-operation. Apparently, at the annual meeting of the Co-operative Union, he always received a standing ovation for his inspirational addresses.
Not so, his rival of a kind, JTW Mitchell, chairman of the Co-operative Wholesale Society, who was running a vast business enterprise and always spoke to the annual statistics about what was in the interests of the company. The thing was that when everyone went home they followed Mitchell rather than Neale.
A journalist observed several of these annual conference and her name was Beatrice Potter. She took a long hard look at worker co-operatives and concluded that they were no way to address the capitalist system. She could find little evidence in Britain of the success of worker co-operatives (this may have been as a result of an adverse legislative environment as they have always seemed to do better in mainland Europe), finding that the owners would buy out the co-ops if they showed any sign of becoming succesful.
Potter concluded that retail and worker co-ops were in competition as it is in the interest of workers to increase wages and of consumers to reduce them. She concluded consumers were best protected by retail co-ops and workers by trade unions.
Some of my non-readers will be sad to note Potter did not hallucinate animals in waistcoats, instead she married Sydney Webb and with others went on to found the Labour Party to safeguard the interests of workers.
So, was Neale a hopeless idealist? It is interesting to ask why worker co-ops did so poorly in Britain. They have been and remain more successful in Europe but they often do so in a legislative environment which supports them. To this day common ownership is not adequately supported in legislation.
One of the purposes of this blog is to equip churches with not only issues but also some answers. Whilst I firmly believe mutuality is an approach which the churches should advocate I tell this story as a warning. Simply having a good method is not enough. We also need to read the signs of the time and explore how any approach might best be used. Mitchell was not charismatic but he could see what worked and how best to support it. He was part of a wide and successful movement of which CWS was only a small part. We need to take note of this movement and its successes but also of its failures.
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